


This Time It Will

by Rovardotter



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: ASoIaF Kink Meme, Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Future, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Because they deserve some happiness in some form, Fluff, Happy Valley, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mai 1968 | May 1968, Reincarnation, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-31
Updated: 2013-11-16
Packaged: 2017-12-25 04:17:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/948537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rovardotter/pseuds/Rovardotter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They parted with snowflakes melting in their hair, and no matter where they meet, they are always the opposite sides of the same coin.</p><p>[1] Paris, 1968<br/>[2] After the world's end<br/>[3] New Richmond, 2173<br/>[4] Out of Africa, 1924<br/>[5] Alabama, 1983</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Theme from an Imaginary Film

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [ASOIAF Kink Meme](http://asoiafkinkmeme.livejournal.com/).
> 
> Original Prompt was _AU. Your OTP [or OTP2 or OTP3 or whatever] across the ages, in different lives, universes and realities. Five times their relationship worked out and one time it didn't._
> 
> I just really want some fluff for them, you know? I'm passing on the +1 for now, because oh my fragile heart.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jean would lift every cobblestone in Paris to find the place where they can be free.

 

 

"You're never around when I need you," his brother smiles and rattles his chains.

His name is Robert, but he calls himself Robb, like a character in one of those American films he loves so much. Sometimes he calls his half-brother John, "Like John Wayne," he laughs. "Or John Ford. It's a good name." Jean doesn't mind that, but he wonders if Robb knows the line between fiction and reality, if he notices when he crosses out of his _films américains_ into the bleak Parisian world outside. Half of the time he is not sure if Robb's words are his own or just a film quote, but he always understands what he means.

Like right now. "You never need me when I'm around," Jean answers.

It is a secret code and he can't help but love it, their little secret, one of many. He lays his hand on the metal cuff around Robb's wrist and thumbs his half-brother's skin to remind him of them all.

Robb is shackled to the gates of the Sorbonne. There are about twenty of them and not one of them a day over twenty, well-dressed girls and boys forming a human chain. They are the brave vanguard. They protect the hundreds of fervent students who block the entrance to the occupied campus. Robb is shirtless, a plaid scarf wound around his neck; words are scribbled on his bare chest, "SOIS JEUNE ET TAIS TOI". _Be young and shut up_.

"Nice," Jean says. "Who wrote that?"

Robb is smug. "A girl," he says. "A girl in a really short skirt."

"A rare sight here, to be sure," Jean says flatly. "I'd pay more attention to _them_." And he points at the police squad gathered nearby, holding their riot shields and batons. Jean is stoic as a rule, _the Hardy to my Laurel_ , Robb says, but he flinches at the idea of one of those batons crashing on his half-brother's pretty head.

"Them?" Robb snorts. "Fascist pigs. The university belongs to the _people_ now. Hey, you should join us."

Jean has seen the Little Red Book tossed in his half-brother's room, with his four-poster bed and the rococo chairs. Robb has never worked a day in his life. With their father's money, he sits at the _café d'hiver_ where Jean waits tables, and talks his heart out about Lévi-Strauss, Foucault and Godard.

"Some of us have to work," Jean says. Their father helps him pay his tuition, just not as much as he helps his other children (Mme. Cateline would have none of that) and it's never enough. At day Jean pretends to smile when Robb and his friends order coffee and call him _Garçon!_ At night he gets even, each thrust into his half-brother's shivering body a retribution and a song of love.

"People here are funny," Robb says. "They work so hard at living, they forget how to live."

Jean leans against him and mumbles in his ear, "I can tie you up later." It's sweet to see how he blushes, or maybe it's just the early May sun and the policemen who are getting perilously closer. It's also sweet, too fucking sweet, when he rubs his cheek against Jean's and breathes, "kiss me."

"Here?"

"It's the revolution. Sous les pavés, la plage," Robb says. _Under the paving stones, the beach._  Jean would lift every cobblestone in Paris to find the place where they can be free. Robb calls out to his friends. "Hey, watch this! My brother's gonna kiss me now."

Jean finds that he doesn't mind that, too. The students laugh and shake their chains, and he thinks back on Robb's coming-of-age ball, of the grey suit his half-brother wore, his easy laughter and the brightness of his eyes, of Mme. Cateline's sour face when she saw Jean, and how proud their father has been. Later they stole away on their bicycles and pedalled through the canals to the small attic Jean rents in the Latin Quarter. Robb flung his jacket off, took a long drag from his cigarette and said, "We never did celebrate _your_ birthday". Jean shrugged, because he had never expected them to. He choked on his wine when Robb unbuttoned his shirt and said, "I want this to be yours." Jean knew they were drunk and it was wrong any way you cared to look at it, but he took his gift, again and again. It seems he has been taking it forever.

And he takes it now, bends for a peck on his half-brother's lips and the human chain jangles for them. Robb traps his bottom lip and sucks on it, pulling Jean in for a deep kiss, and Jean can't help but wonder how his half-brother still directs his every move even when his hands are tied. The policemen are stony-faced, as if they have expected nothing less. The shackled girls and boys cheer for them. Perhaps Paris really belongs to them right now, Jean thinks.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Appendix I: A fanfic to this fanfic, courtesy of dearest SharpestKnife_
> 
> **_Putain_ by [SharpestKnife](http://archiveofourown.org/users/SharpestKnife/pseuds/SharpestKnife)**
> 
> "And I'm just your little servant boy bringing you pretty little coffees. 'Garçon, I want this.' " Jean pressed his face closer, the heat of his glare threatening, his hips pushing ever lower. "Do I serve you well? Answer me."
> 
> Robb only whimpered.
> 
> "Your friend. The one with the black hair. He looks at me, you know. Like he wants to suck my cock. Like he wants me to fuck him." Jean bent to whisper in his ear. "You tell him he's not allowed to look at me like that anymore. No one else can. Only you."
> 
> "Jean, I can't…"
> 
> Jean thrust decisively, deeply, touching the very base of him, and Robb cried out. Jean curled fingers through his hair and murmured, rough and low. "Only you."


	2. Graveyard Grey and Garden Green

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He thinks he's made a mistake. He should have helped Robb bury them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, there's only so much fluff one can write in a world where everybody DIES. The photo is a still from the film "The Road".

 

  

 

The last television broadcast said to evacuate the cities. That was hours ago. A cursed sort of luck that they didn't (that they couldn't). The bodies are spilling out of the abandoned cars, littering the length of the highway.

"What happened here?" his brother mumbles, and Jon deludes himself into thinking that it wasn't a massacre (it was, of course it was; these are rifle wounds, and some of the limbs were hacked off), that they did it to themselves. Those people took one hard look at the deserted road, at the dusty snow piling by the dead trees. They told themselves, _no way, I didn't sign up for this_. Pulling the trigger is easy. Watching others die, that's when it gets hard.

Robb wipes the cold sweat off his face. "I don't even know what to do," he confesses; his voice rings hollow. Jon knows he's not really here, not yet. Mud under his fingernails and blisters on his palms are the only memories Robb has left. He's asked Jon not to help him, and Jon can never refuse his brother. Never could, not even when Robb had up and left (But when the dry snow came, Jon was the first person he'd called.)

He thinks he's made a mistake, though. He should have helped Robb bury them.

Now his brother looks at him as if Jon has all the answers. Jon curls his fingers around the nape of Robb's neck and pretends that he does. "We should leave," he says. Nothing remains in the city but armed men behind overturned cars. "If we're going to survive, we must leave."

"I could give a fuck," Robb murmurs and hides his face in his dirty hands, in the remains of mud and blood (Robb'd rather stay here and die.)

While Jon may not understand marriage or fatherhood, he does understand loss and pain, but there'll be enough time later for his brother to mourn, an eternity. He strokes his damp curls softly and whispers honeyed words into his ear as he coerces him step after step forward. Most people prefer silence in their grief, but Jon remembers how his brother is terrified of nothingness (He used to come to his bed when he couldn't face the emptiness of the night.) Silence, for Robb, equals death.

"You'll be okay," Jon hums repeatedly. "You gotta be strong now, for her, for the baby, for me. Let it out, cry it out. You'll be okay."

When civilisation crumbles down, Jon thinks, women are the first to fall. It was too early for her. Jon had run out to seek help; he had even climbed over the gates of the hospital (But all he'd found was bloated bodies and the dust, the dust is everywhere.) They laid towels underneath her, but it was not enough to soak up all the blood. She clutched the limp baby to her bosom until she slackened in Robb's arms, her long brown hair streaked wet from her husband's tears.

"I'm okay," Robb says sometime later. "I'm okay." Their coats are wrapped tight about them as they walk by the edge of the highway. The skies are grey and cloudy, as if a tempest gathers (It does, always does, with wild fires and waves as high as a skyscraper.)

"Not yet," Jon can't lie to him as much as he can't deny him anything. "But you will be. Maybe down south it's not that cold. Maybe they haven't had riots. Maybe Dad and the girls are just fine." Robb's mother and their little brothers were the first to go. The hospitals were still open then (Swine flu, they said.)

"Do you believe that," Robb asks flatly, and Jon shakes his head because he doesn't.

There's something primal about it, as if the world doesn't end but restarts: death in childbirth, a nomad family of two brothers, a post-apocalyptic Cain and Abel. Except Jon has never let his jealousy hurt his brother, not even when he's always tried double to win half. Jon is the child left behind, silent, sour and hard to like. He could never imitate his brother's easy charm, but he's a survivor (She gets to leave and Jon has to pick up the pieces.) He can't help but feel a shameful pride when he's the one to stand strong; he's the one to pull his wrecked brother through the ruins of the old world.

Lately, the days are almost as dark as the nights and it's hard to tell them apart. When the light is too dim to see, they make camp between two dead oaks. They don't dare to light a fire. Robb comes to him in the emptiness of the night (the way he came to him the night before his wedding) and slides next to him inside his sleeping bag. He's all burning needs and shaking hands and he begs Jon to turn him over and do whatever he wants with him. Jon can never deny him anything. He thinks he hurts Robb. He thinks Robb wants to hurt.

"Please," he whispers when the kisses grow softer. "I left you, you remember?"

"I don't care," Jon says.

"I wanted a family, a normal family… I left you."

"I knew you'd come back."

"Would I?" Robb mumbles. "If it weren't for this, would I?"

"Eventually," Jon says. He complies; he allows Robb to break apart in his arms under the nothingness of the night (A sheet of snow now covers the cold bodies of his wife and son.)

"It's not sadness," Robb says afterwards, eyes half-lidded, head resting under Jon's chin. "I'm just angry at her. Does it make sense?" he pleads. "Tell me how it makes sense."

"Leaving is easy," Jon says and kisses his hair. "Staying, that's when it gets hard."


	3. The District Sleeps Alone Tonight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jon cannot say with certainty if it was the murder he was running from, or Robb.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Seems it's always going to be bittersweet for those two, but I'm trying, dammit. The setting is loosely based on the book "Spares" by Michael Marshall Smith. The photo is a still from the movie "A.I. Artificial Intelligence".

The bar is not exactly what Jon would call seedy. It's dimly lit, no one's been shot here tonight, and a live band plays jazz on the stage. Still, he can't miss the look in Robb's eyes as he takes his seat by the bar. It's his half-brother's first time this low in the bowels of the city, through the maze of corridors and neon lights under the 100th floor, and Jon can imagine how pitiable it all seems to him.

"So now you see how the other half lives," Jon says.

"I see how my other half lives," Robb smiles.

It's maddening that Robb can get away with casually saying such things, as if they were still kids, holding hands and promises. Robb doesn't belong here in his suave suit and smart shoes. The heir to the filthy rich of New Richmond ( _drug lords_ , Jon thinks, _and organ traffickers_ ) shouldn't sit next to a cop in a dingy little joint on the 39th floor.

"So," Robb props his elbow on the bar. "A drink, officer?"

Jon thinks it was easier back at the police station; he had his job and his investigation as a wall between them. Now he has neither, and he taps the counter screen for two pints of beer. Robb lights a cigarette, and Jon notices how he looks just as calm sipping his drink as he did while interrogated by the NRPD. Jon shouldn't feel so worked up about this. It's only logical they'd send Jon to question the brother he has left behind in the upper city ( _gaudy mansions scrape the Virginian skies_ , Jon remembers, _and in the clubs of the 116 th floor the drugged kids dance their youth away_.) But that child he knew is long gone, with his loud laughter and curls like sunset on plasma screens. Robb is a man now, and his smile an empty pack.

"Five kids, Stark," he told Robb, "dead." And Robb shrugged, "they sometimes do that." People seemed to do that an awful lot where the Starks were involved. Lately a new drug has started circulating in their nightclubs: highly addictive and apparently deadly. Jon remembers a time when it was them popping pills in Robb's room, sprawled on his bed. Robb would lay his head in Jon's lap, eyes glazed over, his mouth dropped open, and he would look vulnerable and very young. There must be some of that child left in the man ( _must be_ , Jon thinks, _they can't have sucked him all dry_ ) because here they are, sharing a drink, Jon off-duty and Robb out-of-custody.

Jon sips from his beer, and Robb takes a long drag from his cigarette.

"We all miss you, you know," he says. "I miss you." The terrible thing is, Jon knows. When the shit with the Lannister kid went down, Robb's begged him to just do it ( _listen to Father,_ he said, _Jon, please_.) His hands were shaking; a drop of blood trickled down his nose from all the lines he'd snorted to dull his fear. And Jon knows he's the one to blame for that vacant look in his brother's eyes, that glossy cellophane of his smile.

"I want to see it," Robb says and stubs out the smoke. "Your house, your new life."

They end up by the low elevator together; pale fluorescent bathes the sewerage puddles on the cement floor. It's a truly terrible idea, but Jon can't seem to stop. He flashes his card through the scanner and they are shot to the residential floor of 72, between fake cobblestone paths, clotheslines and potted plants. It's not that bad. Some of the flats here even have windows. Not Jon's, but he has a screen installed on the wall and he can pretend to have a view of snowy, distant mountains. The Starks' mansion is three stories high on the 202, and when Robb first kissed him by the window they had the entire wasteland spread before their eyes, red sun poisonous over the white dunes and the remains of the old highway ( _one day we'll throw down a rope and be gone_ , Robb promised as their lips clashed, _no family, just us._ )

"Take your shirt off," Robb says as he leans against the screen; snowflakes flutter over his hair. "I want to see." Wordlessly they examine how much they both have grown. Robb looks leaner and there's a nasty scar on his shoulder which wasn't there when Jon's left. Jon reaches very slowly to touch it, and before he knows it, he has Robb laced underneath him on the sofa.

They've never done this before. It was just kisses and a fragile bubble of all the sweetness they've dared to scoop up the marble stairs of their father's house. One time in the indoor pool Robb sucked on his neck and murmured soft words ( _you're my brother, my everything,_ he said, _you hold me together_.) He rubbed himself against Jon's wet skin until he shuddered and sighed. He brushed the front of Jon's swimming trunk with his hand, and it was truly embarrassing how quickly Jon came. Robb laughed then and kissed his shoulder ( _next time I'll make it better for you_ , he said, _I swear_.) It was just before the Lannister kid, and Jon cannot say with certainty if it was the murder he was running from, or Robb.

"The police know Father's behind that drug," Jon now says as he thrusts into his brother, their brows pressed close together, his fingers still stroking the scars he wasn't there to prevent.

"Of course he is," Robb mumbles, "and there's no way out." He doesn't look so much in control anymore. Perhaps he looks as lost as he had that night when Father had sent them to off that kid. Father had wanted them baptised into the family with fresh blood on their hands. Robb has pulled through; he's made Father proud. Jon has run away into the lower city; he's switched sides and joined the force. He still has to tell himself he's made the right choice.

Jon wishes the city could swallow them both. "Then stay here," he tells Robb and softly cups his cheeks. "Stay with me," he pushes into him ( _I'm sorry_ , he wants to say, _I'm sorry you pulled the trigger and I wasn't there_.) The desperation in his voice scares him.

Robb's eyes are a sea of blue and moisture. He buckles as Jon presses deep into him and finally binds them together.

"Stay here," when he comes it's with a cry and it's better, infinitely better than a quick stroke in a heated pool. "It's not much, I don't even have windows," Jon says and Robb twines their fingers together, "but we can always watch the snow."


	4. Ultimately We Are All Outsiders

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Auburn curls escape under his pith helmet, a world away from that broken boy who had fled the echoes of the Great War across the Suez Canal.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The picture is a still from the film "White Mischief", starring our very own Tywin Lannister as the ever-naughty Lord Erroll. Small world!
> 
> Beta'd by rafiki yangu mpendwa [SharpestKnife](http://archiveofourown.org/users/SharpestKnife/pseuds/SharpestKnife), for which many thanks and the biggest, sweetest pineapple from the bazaars of Nyeri.

The car breaks down halfway to Nanyuki.

Outside the low hills roll in burnt yellow as far as the eye can see; the dirt road snakes between them. A lone acacia stands further down the dusty path. This close to the equator, Jon thinks, the noon sun seems so low he can almost touch it. He scrambles out of the passenger seat as Robb opens the engine cover. Thick grey smoke stings their eyes.

"Gone?"

"Unlikely," Robb says, bending over. "Probably just overheating. Let's wait a while."

"Wouldn't we be late for your lady friend's party?" Jon asks.

"This party, brother," says Robb, "is the kind you're never late for."

Jon is a stranger here, his skin still wears the pastiness of the pale English sun, and he finds it hard to tell the truth from the whispers he's heard late at night at the Muthaiga Country Club in Nairobi ( _"It's funny, isn't it," Robb pondered as the maid served them tea on the veranda, "that I'd travel to another continent just to sit with other Englishmen_.") One patron, a bankrupt lord back home, a sheep breeder here, confided in Jon over a glass of bourbon that the parties last for three days and three nights, a Roman orgy under the Kenyan sun. " _The Happy Valley_ , they call it," the lord sneered. " _The Devil's Lair_ would be more appropriate. Champagne, cocaine and fornication, they bring shame on us all."

Jon is no stranger to shame, however, and he slowly wraps his arm around Robb's waist. By the acacia there is no one to witness their secret, Jon thinks, so he plants a small kiss just under his brother's ear. "Is it true," he mutters, "that Lady Idina greets her guests naked in a bathtub full of red wine?"

"So she does," Robb says. His breath quickens; he responds quickly, always has. His hands grip the sides of the car. "As does Lord Erroll."

"And the wife-swapping, is that also true?"

"I'd say you're jealous, Jon."

Back home, their father had ordered Jon to find his brother, lost over a year in the bush of Africa _("The Stanley to my Livingstone, I presume?" Robb smiled when they finally met at the port of Mombasa.)_ Jon presses closer now, ready to claim him back. "You shouldn't have left," he tells him, voice hoarse. "I'd have helped you."

"How could you," Robb mumbles. "What do you even know of fear?"

"I know you." Jon's lips trace the scar down his neck. "Better than anyone ever will." Robb wriggles, once again that scrawny boy in his black Eton tailcoat and the pinstriped trousers ( _"I can show you what I've learnt at school, brother," he told Jon as he took off his tie, "but you mustn't tell Father._ ") "Drugs and orgies, honestly, Robb. What would the Duke of Stark say if he knew?"

Robb turns his head, and the boy is gone; now it's the young lieutenant, twice decorated for bravery, his blue eyes afire. "I did my bit," he hisses. "Father is in no position to lecture me anymore."

He wrings himself free of Jon's hold and strides away from the car towards the acacia. He looks healthy at least, tanned and radiant in his safari jacket and khaki shorts ( _"Only shorts, you don't want snakes crawling up your trousers_ , _" Robb told him absently in their shared compartment on the train to Nairobi. He drew the mosquito net down and Jon found his brother's body through the savannah heat_.) Auburn curls escape under his pith helmet, a world away from that broken boy who had fled the echoes of the Great War across the Suez Canal, Jon thinks. Their father has two sons, but only one of the right name; when King George raised the flags, it was Robb who bore the brunt of his noble birth, cannoned straight from his public school into the trenches of the western front.

Jon watches as his brother grabs a twig, crouches by the tree and starts digging at the ground. He thinks back to 1919 and Waterloo Station, when the flu was raging and Robb had just returned from France, an empty shell woven together like a jigsaw ( _"You didn't know what would kill you," he said as he fed his pipe, "the artillery or the boredom. We shouted at the Germans every morning, guten Morgen! Have you got any spare fags? Maybe we can all go home?"_ ) They rode their horses out of their father's estate and stopped for breakfast and a drink at the local pub. Robb missed his every dart throw, his hands were shaking so. He said little at first, and when he did, his clear blue eyes looked distant, almost black ( _"On Christmas Day we all played football, heaven have mercy. Two weeks later I shot their goalie in the head._ ")

Perhaps Robb is right and he would never truly understand, Jon thinks, about terror and the trenches and _la noblesse oblige_. Perhaps he has said too much, has only pushed his brother deeper into the Happy Valley. But when Robb returns to the car, he smiles broadly and holds a pineapple in his hand. He draws his Swiss Army knife and peels it; his fingers are wet and sticky as he tears ripe yellow slices for his brother. They eat the fruit whole, sap running down their chins.

"You'd do well to clean up this mess," Robb tells him and runs a finger over Jon's cheek, into his mouth. He tastes tingly sweet, like the sun, close enough to touch.

"Can do more," Jon says. "Get inside the car."

"No need to hide, they all think we're mad as it is," and Robb gives a sudden laugh. "I suppose we are." Jon takes his fingers inside his mouth. Each eager suck causes Robb to quiver and he leans onto him. "That's why I like it so, do you now see?" he breathes. "This is their land. We have no history here, no names to bind us."

Later, as the town of Nanyuki looms before them, Robb brakes the car. Jon looks at him inquiringly, but his brother only answers with a grin. He points to a three-rock formation by the side of the trail.

"This is the equator," he says. "Just here."

Jon pulls him closer, lips resting on his brother's brow.

"Day equals night, north equals south," Robb says, and his eyes are bright blue and shining under the afternoon sun, close enough for Jon to finally touch. "Perhaps here we can all be free." 


	5. Kings of Carrot Flowers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Under the blazing sun John swore to forever protect the boy he had grown to call a brother.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is what happens when I listen to Neutral Milk Hotel on the bus. The picture is a still from the film "Mysterious Skin".
> 
> Much love and many thanks to [SharpestKnife](http://archiveofourown.org/users/SharpestKnife/pseuds/SharpestKnife), the beautiful face I have found in this place, and the other half of my two-headed boy.

The shouts wake them up.

The sun sifts through the window blinds, cruel on their sweaty faces, and a door slams shut somewhere inside the house. Rob blinks, stretches on the bed; he's still wearing his jeans and sneakers. They can hear his mom yell as she starts to throw the dishes across the kitchen floor.

"Stupid bitch," their dad says, too drunk to care. "Break it all, why don't you."

When Rob's mom is mad, she forgets the mortgage and the towering bills, forgets the unemptied trash bins and the purple bruises on her son's back. John doesn't even have to do anything to provoke her but simply exist. "Kick your fucking son outta here," she shouts ( _Rob is theirs, and he that spareth his rod hateth his son_.) Another plate whooshes, shatters. "Can't stand his face anymore."

"Well, I like your face." Rob yawns. John likes his too, likes his curls too long and plastered to his brow, how his lips wobble in his sleep, and that piercing sliver of blue when he squints his eyes ( _And his hands when they were kids, John thinks. Scared and lonely, he wept into the pillow of his new bed, but little fingers crept and entwined with his own_.)

"Small mercies," says John.

"Alright, you heard the lady." Rob fumbles for his shirt. "Let's get outta here."

When they were little they would steal away through the back door, onto their bikes and down along the old train tracks. They would gather sticks and wildflowers, and their wooden castles would lean against the pine trees. Rob would declare himself king and John his most trusted knight _("Our evil parents died," Rob said, "and we became the rulers of never-ending winter." Under the blazing sun John swore to forever protect the boy he had grown to call a brother_.)

Now they are older, though, and have other ways of comforting each other. Cement blocks cover the forest trails of the past, and the pines they'd once ruled were replaced by houses with faded red tiled roofs. It's always quiet here ( _abandoned_ ). White sheets sway in the gentle breeze on the clotheslines. A plastic tricycle rests by the peeling paint of the picket fences. They pedal further down the road to the playground; the merry-go-round is swung off its hinge. Children don't play here anymore. John wonders if they ever have at all. Teenagers play here at night-time, different games, and the ground is strewn with their cigarettes stubs. Rob is off his bike, beer bottles in hand, and he squats and crawls into the playhouse without looking back. They lay side by side inside; the roof is missing a shingle and they stare at the crisp blue of the sky.

"Would you kill them?" Rob asks. "If you could?"

"You know I would," John says. The beer is warm and bitter at the back of his throat.

He doesn't move yet; he just lets himself drown in Rob's scent of cigarettes and sweat, mixed with an unfamiliar whiff of cheap aftershave ( _John never asks where he's been_.) He always waits for his half-brother to make the first move, no matter how badly he craves his touch. He needs to make sure this is what Rob really wants ( _He'll never be like their dad, never_.) One day, John fears, this would stop, but in the meantime Rob slides closer, rolls over to straddle him, his face slick with sweat against John's wet shirt.

"Would you shoot them?" His brother's lips cling to his neck, his tongue lapping at the beads of perspiration dripping down his skin. "Both of them?"

John nods and thinks back to when they were children, hiding under their beds _("Don't worry," Rob whispered to him as his mom hurled the empty bottle at their father. "Just wait till they calm down, then you'll see."_ ) Afterwards they sneaked out of their room, and Rob's mom was on the sofa, laughing, and their father grunting between her legs. John could feel a strange heat rising in his cheeks as he watched them move, his eyes wide, and Rob pulled him by the hand back to bed. They didn't know words for it, knew only the softness of skin against skin as Rob climbed on top of him _("Do you like it?" Rob asked as he slipped his hand between John's legs. "I do it to myself sometimes."_ )

John hates how their way of being so close can also be brutal, and he hates how the best he has to offer his brother is also the worst. He fights to keep it sweet ( _too fucking sweet_ ) and it melts his heart when Rob doesn't stop talking as he unzips John's jeans, chatter of murder, shotguns and hitching rides to New York. He is no longer a child, he now knows what they do has a name ( _sin_ ), but he won't stop, can't stop ( _he's damned, he'd be damned if he does_ ), not when Rob needs him so, not when it feels so good. He sits up when he enters his brother, hands tight on his backside, their lips inches apart ( _He needs to be careful, so careful, he knows. He holds a piece of Rob's soul in his hands._ )

When Rob sinks his head to the hollow of John's neck, he mumbles softly, "I love you, love you, love you." He repeats it like a magic charm as he gently rocks into his brother's arms. His face is flushed. He inserts his thumb into his mouth; he's sucking on it as he screws his eyes shut, and John is reminded again how young he is, how young they both are. Rob's cascade of words fall into incoherence, and John repays him in kind, the only way he knows how to. He pushes fully into him and promises, "If he ever touches you again, I'll kill him."

"We'll make a run for it," Rob groans; he tenses and his seed is pearly white on John's belly. John comes silently, clutching his brother closer, and somehow the image of their father's brains splattered on the floor, Rob's mom growing stiff and cold, and stopping long-distance trucks on the interstate, all the way from central Alabama to New York, undressing in the heat and huddling in the cold, it doesn't seem that far-fetched at all.

As the afternoon sky grows darker and the mosquitoes begin to whine, they sit on the swings and finish their beers, the glow of their cigarettes fogging their eyes. And this may be all they have to give each other, John thinks, all that they would ever have, but for as long as Rob needs him, he will be around.


End file.
